


(the way you) move me

by Iambic



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Character Study, Episode 10 spoilers, M/M, Non-Chronological
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 15:38:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8806570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iambic/pseuds/Iambic
Summary: Katsuki Yuuri and dancing: a love story in five movements.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I tripped and fell into YOI fandom and then I tripped and fell into writing this fan fiction and now it is 3 AM and somehow I have zero regrets but also I have fallen and I can't get up

The world doesn’t spin so much as shimmer around Yuuri. Somehow he’s gasping for breath at the same time as breathing too deep, his veins _flooded_ , his nerves singing, his heart pounding in his chest and—it’s not exactly sexual, the feeling, but he understands suddenly how Christophe Giacometti manages to orgasm out on the ice so much. If it always feels like this.

It’s not for the ice, and it’s not for the routine. It’s not even for knowing he’s blown all his best performances, and the crowds, away. Lightning crackles through the band of gold on his right ring finger, and when Yuuri looks up—

Victor. The same exhilaration in his face, his posture.

Yuuri has just outperformed himself beyond belief, but he’s never skated harder than he does now, this electricity shocking him home.

 

 

Mari tells him that he didn’t skate as much as dance across the rink to Victor, and Yuuri wouldn’t believe her except that everyone around him pulls out their phone to offer proof. It could have been embarrassing, but somehow it isn’t, because the one thing Yuuri can remember about throttling forward beyond that _feeling_ is how Victor had watched him, transcendent.

“No,” Minako says, suddenly serious, “I want you to see yourself, Yuuri. It was beautiful.”

So he presses play. And he had expected something sloppy, maybe wild like the night he doesn’t remember, but what he sees—somehow in time to the roar of the crowd—are shifts and curved slides. Fluidity.

“Oh,” he says.

Minako smiles wicked, shakes her head. “Well, everyone knows what you were thinking about.”

Yuuri finds it in himself, unexpectedly, to laugh. His fingers uncurl with it, and the ring brushes smooth against his adjacent finger. “Ah, well… ‘thinking’ isn’t really the right word for what I was doing.”

 

 

Off-season. Yuuri is fourteen and his current coach forbids him from skating for three months, one for each day after his last competition he spent in utter meltdown. “Focus on dancing again,” she says. “I can work with Minako to make sure you’re keeping yourself in condition.”

She sees him when he crumples in on himself, and she has never been cruel, only stern. “This is not punishment. You need to see to your art in a way that has nothing to do with competing.”

Yuuri cries anyway, when he leaves the rink, and again in Yuuko’s arms after telling her what happened. It leaves him scraped and raw and somehow perfectly balanced. So that evening, instead of working on homework, he opens YouTube and watches video after video of dancers.

In the end Minako teaches him ballroom, as well as making him keep training in ballet. She pushes him into leading and following based on whatever position she wants to take at any given time, and three months pass of Yuuri smiling more often than he can remember ever smiling before.

He returns to the ice. He keeps dancing with Minako.

 

 

“You know, I used to follow your career,” Victor says, and even though Yuuri should really be used to the way he says such intense things the same way he tossed cherry stems onto the sand in the late spring—well, Yuuri will probably never get used to that.

“You _what_ ,” Yuuri says. His voice is shrill and kind of breaks at the end.

And Victor, the menace, who knows exactly what he’s doing because for some reason his life’s goal has become trying to actually murder Yuuri with shock and affection, smiles. At least it’s a little bashful. “I’ve always liked watching the juniors circuit. I suppose it reminds me that figure skating is better raw than predictable. But you stood out.”

Yuuri wonders if he should feel insulted or not.

“You skated imperfectly because you were too wrapped up in the skating itself,” Victor continues. He reaches his right hand across the centimeters of mattress between them, slowly, like he thinks he’s being sneaky. “I found it difficult to look away.”

“People have trouble looking away from car crashes, too,” Yuuri says, but the bitterness that could have been there had given way to teasing at some point; he’s happier now. He takes Victor’s hand in his, because he’s also become impatient.

Victor _tsks_ but also weaves their fingers together. “You know that’s not what I mean.”

For a long time, Yuuri had yearned for Victor in the way of the unrequited lover. And then in China they had fallen into each other with wonder, which has been the general theme of the sex they’ve had since, even as they learn each other, even as they fall into patterns. But now?

Desperation. They press together, every bit of skin that can fit, and it’s still not _enough_. Maybe it’s not even arousal driving them, although that’s also definitely there. But strain for it, as if by desire and devotion alone they could merge and be completely and simultaneously inside each other.

This is also dancing, and Yuuri has always been a dedicated practitioner. This is dancing with Victor more intimately than any other movement. Not even by his side, but joined together.

After, Yuuri slips his glasses back on and raises his head, to find Victor looking almost melancholy.

“I watched your performances last year from the crowd. But during the Final itself…”

Victor trails off. Yuuri brings a hand to his jaw because words don’t form to give a better response.

“I didn’t watch either of your programs,” Victor finally says, voice low and confessional.

Despite his efforts, Yuuri can’t help laughing. “You have no idea how relieving that would have been to hear last winter.”

Victor watches his eyes and touches his hand. “Maybe I’m superstitious. But I won’t take my eyes off of you again.”

“No,” says Yuuri, “you won’t.”

 

 

In Detroit Yuuri can’t afford a dance instructor, and the people he’s closest to are all skaters too. But he makes a friend: Phichit.

Phichit Chulanont isn’t just the life of the party, he _is_ the party, no matter where he is or what he’s doing. Yuuri finishes a paper early one night in the back half of September and Phichit decides that they are going dancing, right now, change into something stylish, Yuuri!

(None of Yuuri’s clothes are all that stylish. They have to compromise: Phichit lends him a shirt that becomes form-fitting on Yuuri’s broader torso, and Yuuri wears an older pair of dark jeans that could almost look fashionably distressed.

“We’re getting you some new clothes,” Phichit announces, when the matter is settled.

“Then _I’ll_ be fashionably distressed,” Yuuri says.)

The loud music takes some adjusting to, but Yuuri does adjust, and the pounding of the bass consumes him immediately. Phichit insists they take a shot together, so Yuuri waits, and coughs when the fumes rise in his throat, and then pulls Phichit toward the dance floor only moments after they set their glasses down.

“I like this side of Yuuri Katsuki!” Phichit yells over the crowd and the speakers. “Where does he go?”

Yuuri blushes a little, remembering embarrassment. “I just like dancing,” he says, and then yells it when Phichit can’t hear.

Phichit smiles, wide, wide, wide. “I can tell!”

Club dancing is—incredible. It’s all improvisation, all about the beat, and it comes so _naturally_ , not like anything else Yuuri has done with his body, even skating. He doesn’t feel sexy, exactly, but he feels _alive_.

The next week as they leave the rink, Yuuri suggests going dancing again. Phichit stares at him. “This is the best monster I have ever created,” he says, awe-struck and delighted.

 

 

“We should take dance classes before the wedding,” Victor says midway through his cup of coffee. The word still jumps through Yuuri’s chest every time Victor says it, and he hadn’t even—he keeps making these unintentional gestures, and then finding he suddenly means them when Victor lights up like the ice at the Grand Prix Final, incandescent. And it _scares_ Yuuri, how deeply he’s hurt Victor before without ever knowing the power he had to do so, and how easy it would be to make those mistakes again.

The ring had been a good luck charm, and a promise, and a way to communicate something he didn’t have enough command of the English language to properly explain. Victor would give him anything. Yuuri doesn’t know how to give him everything.

But Victor had accepted the proposal Yuuri hadn’t really understood making, and Yuuri wants to _learn_.

“You know ballroom dancing,” Yuuri says, touching Victor’s wrist. “I know ballroom dancing. Why take a class?”

Victor smiles, a teasing thing. “Hmm. Maybe I forgot how.”

“Maybe you just want an excuse to dance with me,” Yuuri says.

The teasing fades from Victor’s expression, and he’s suddenly achingly earnest in the chill morning light, the way he is with no one else but Yuuri. He is sitting here on the opposite side of a wooden table on a Barcelona winter morning, killing time before the flight back to Japan, and he is Victor Nikiforov, and he is the best thing that has ever happened to Yuuri in his entire life. “Do I need one?” he asks, as if he could possibly be unsure.

“Never,” Yuuri replies.

 

 

Pole-dancing is only Phichit’s fault in that he introduced Yuuri to clubbing. He’s out with a couple people he sort of knows from one of his classes. There’s a small stage, unused, where people are dancing. And then it’s empty, and Yuuri’s had a few drinks, and he really does love performing. There’s no reason _not_ to get up there and dance.

He gets a lot of phone numbers he won’t call, a few dollar bills that will scandalize him in the morning, and a business card. _You’d be great at this!_ someone has written in bright purple ink. What convinces him, though, is the printed line that says, _Student discount._

It’s dancing, after all. He doesn’t have to _seduce_ anyone.

 

 

(But of course he does it anyway.)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [(the way you) move me [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11470113) by [so1thought](https://archiveofourown.org/users/so1thought/pseuds/so1thought)




End file.
